Caroline Shaw's Musical Portraits

Caroline Shaw’s Musical Portraits Owen Belcher University of Missouri-Kansas City Composer, singer, and violinist Caroline Shaw is best known for her Pulitzer prize- winning Partita for 8 Voices, her performances with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and her cross-genre collaborations with artists including Kanye West.1 Beyond Partita, however, Shaw’s work has received little scholarly attention.2 As a first step towards exploring this repertoire, I isolate one widespread compositional device in Shaw’s music: intertextuality. To narrow things further, I examine one type of intertextuality in Shaw’s compositions. Though most of Shaw’s pieces employ intertextual techniques to some degree, I argue that a subset of her works can be interpreted as musical portraits of other works. Adapting Joshua Walden’s (2009, 2018) studies on musical portraits, and Wendy Steiner’s (1987) exploration of abstract portraiture in literature and the visual arts, I explore this compositional procedure through analyses of the string quartet, Blueprint (2016), and the piano piece Gustave Le Gray (2012). In both analyses, my goal is to demonstrate how Shaw’s works, like the modernist portraits of the early twentieth-century and the musical portraits of individuals from the eighteenth-century, can function as representations of their musical subjects. This presentation, taken from a larger project on Shaw’s music, presents some preliminary analytical observations. Ongoing and future work explores these ideas in greater detail. 1 For an overview of Shaw’s various collaborations, see Stacey Anderson, “Is Caroline Shaw really the future of music?” The Guardian, June 9, 2016., https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/Jun/09/caroline-shaw-classical- music-kanye-west; accessed June 26, 2019. 2 Recent work on the Partita includes the Ithaca Music Forum at Ithaca College, with paper presentations by Crystal Peebles, Timothy Johnson, and Sara Haefeli. The Forum was held on December 6, 2017. See also Anna Fulton (2019). 1 Walden has studied the long history of musical portraiture from its 18th-century origins in works by François Couperin and C.P.E. Bach (2008) to contemporary examples in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by composers including Virgil Thompson, Morton Feldman, and Philip Glass (2018). David Fuller (1997) traces the genre’s roots to the short literary portraits of members of the French aristocracy that were fashionable in the 1650s (157–160). Musical portraits are necessarily more abstract than painted or literary portraits, but Walden demonstrates how composers such as C.P.E. Bach believed that music could be as effective as other media in its ability to represent a subject, and that musical portraits should concentrate on the subject’s personality and character (2009, 379). For example, in his keyboard portrait, La Stahl, Bach represents the “respectable social standing and temperament” of his friend and doctor Georg Ernst Stahl through musical topics, combining “chorale and French overture gestures” in D minor with “the singing style to evoke Stahl’s gentle, sensitive nature” (390–391). The audience associates the composition with its subject—in this case, Stahl—largely because of the title, which provides a “lens through which to perceive notes and structures as representations of human characteristics” (380).3 The portraitist’s focus on inner character rather than physical description—on abstract, subjective impression rather than realism—is not limited to musical depictions. In the 20th century, literary and visual portraitists frequently abandoned literal representation in favor of a “broader and multi-dimensional conception of the indivisible aspects of the sitter’s subjectivity” (Walden 2018, 5). Charles Demuth’s painting, “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” (1928), and Gertrude Stein’s poem, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923) are representative examples. Figure 1 reproduces Demuth’s painting. The work—a portrait of the 3 To hear C.P.E. Bach’s piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbBxC5Q2Y2M 2 poet William Carlos Williams—is named after latter’s poem “The Great Figure,” and consists of, among other images related to that poem, three figure 5s. Eschewing physical portrayal, Demuth represents Williams via allusion to Williams’ poetry.4 Figure 1. Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928). Oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stein’s modernist poem is the literary equivalent of Demuth’s painting, as it refers to Picasso only in the title, without referencing biographical details of Picasso’s life. Like Bach’s La Stahl, Stein’s title helps the reader interpret the poem with Picasso in mind—a connection that might not be possible otherwise. 4 This and additional basic information is summarized in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s entry: https://www.metmuseum.org/en/art/collection/search/488315. For a detailed analysis, see Aiken (1987). 3 The works discussed so far portray individuals. Many (but not all) of Shaw’s musical portraits, on the other hand, take other musical works as their subjects. Shaw’s portraits depict their subjects through a variety of means: sometimes directly, through quotation, and other times indirectly or abstractly, by developing characteristic motivic, textural, harmonic, or formal details extrapolated from the subject work—a process I argue is analogous to a modernist portrait such as Demuth’s “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.” Shaw composed the string quartet Blueprint in 2016 for the Aizuri Quartet on a commission by the Wolf Trap foundation for the Performing Arts.5 Figure 2 reproduces Shaw’s accompanying program note. Figure 2. Caroline Shaw’s program note for Blueprint (2016). The Aizuri Quartet's name comes from “aizuri-e,” a style of Japanese woodblock printing that primarily uses a blue ink. In the 1820s, artists in Japan began to import a particular blue pigment known as "Prussian blue," which was first synthesized by German paint producers in the early 18th century and later modified by others as an alternative to indigo. The story of aizuri-e is one of innovation, migration, transformation, craft, and beauty. Blueprint, composed for the incredible Aizuri Quartet, takes its title from this beautiful blue woodblock printing tradition as well as from that familiar standard architectural representation of a proposed structure: the blueprint. This piece began its life as a harmonic reduction — a kind of floor plan — of Beethoven's string quartet Op. 18, No. 6. As a violinist and violist, I have played this piece many times, in performance and in joyous late-night reading sessions with musician friends. (One such memorable session included Aizuri's marvelous cellist, Karen Ouzounian.) Chamber music is ultimately about conversation without words. We talk to each other with our dynamics and articulations, and we try to give voice to the composers whose music has inspired us to gather in the same room and play music. Blueprint is also a conversation — with Beethoven, with Haydn (his teacher and the "father" of the string quartet), and with the joys and malinconia of his Op. 18, No. 6. As described in the program note, the title, Blueprint, has two meanings. Firstly, the color blue references the name of the Aziuri Quartet, whose name derives from Japanese woodblock 5 For a recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDSZogi8nts 4 printing characterized by the use of blue ink. Secondly, the title refers to the architectural schematic. In reference to this second meaning, Shaw writes that the “piece began its life as a harmonic reduction—a kind of floor plan—of Beethoven’s string quartet Op. 18, No. 6,” later mentioning the work’s “joys and malinconia” [emphasis original] (Shaw 2016). Both meanings suggest representation: one meaning refers to a literal blue woodblock print; the other to a bird’s eye view of a structure. Both meanings suggest interpreting Blueprint as a portrait of Beethoven’s work could yield meaningful analytical insights. Figure 3. A form diagram of Blueprint. Section 1 (intro.) Section 2 Transition Section 3 mm. 1 – 60 mm. 61 – 156 mm. 157 – 215 mm. 216 – 265 B min. à V/Bß maj. Bß maj. unstable Bß maj. Newly composeD DecontextualizeD Fragments of direct Sustained quotations material; stylistic juxtaposition of quotations of form the presto finale allusions Beethoven’s 1st Beethoven’s juxtaposeD with new movement malinconia emerge material Figure 3 diagrams the large-scale form of Blueprint. My analysis segments the movement into three large sections and a transition. Section 1 is a sixty-measure introduction consisting of newly-composed material along with fleeting allusions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century harmonic idioms. Section 2 decontextualizes features of Beethoven’s first movement, extracting and juxtaposing its characteristic musical gestures. A transitional passage leads to Section 3, where a series of increasingly obvious quotations of Beethoven’s finale conclude the quartet. The overall form of Blueprint reflects what Peter Burkholder (1985) calls a “cumulative setting,” whereby the composer “develops motives from the [source] tune or presents important countermelodies before the theme itself is whole at the end” (3). Section 1 presents occasional 5 stylistic allusions to common practice tonal language, Section 2 employs jumbled fragments of Beethoven’s first movement, while unadorned, direct quotations emerge in the transition and Section 3. Figures 4–9 review the process in detail. Figure 4 shows the beginning of Blueprint. The repetitive initial idea is a characteristic opening strategy for Shaw, as evidenced by Figures 5a and 5b which excerpt the openings of the string quartet Entr’acte (2011) and Gustave Le Gray (2012) respectively. Figure 4. Blueprint, beginning. The initial idea is boxed. like a marble bust stoic & grand & still but with a little wink or some side-eye 6 Figure 5a: Entr’acte, beginning.

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